Meteors in August (15 page)

“Turned her into a lush. And when he died, she had to sell his house to support her drinking. Lives like trash. I hate to think what's going to happen to that woman when the money runs out.”

“Me too,” Mother whispered.

Arlen stood and kissed the air near my cheek. “Staying with your family too long will warp you, Lizzie,” she said. “You just look around this town and you'll see I know what I'm talking about.”

As soon as Arlen was out the door, I said, “Mom—”

“Not a word,” she said.

I tried again. I wanted to tell her that I wouldn't leave, not until she was ready to have me go. She pressed her knuckles into her eyes. “Not now,” she said, “please don't tell me anything now.”

I thought of growing old in my parents' house, cooking their dinners, washing their sheets. I imagined Eula and Luella in their bath, soaping each other's back—who cared what anyone else thought? I saw Myron making his mother's tea after dinner so that she could rest her feet. There were so many things he couldn't do, but he was able to do this night after night, and I believed the smallest acts of kindness might save us from God's anger, might allow Him to be merciful in the end.

Now that I believed I saw the answer, the humble path, I was anxious to show God how gladly I would give up my life to His will. To my mind, nothing could be more work than attending the prayer meetings Marlene Grosswilder held in the auditorium every morning before school. But I was God's docile lamb. This was just one small test.

For three mornings in a row I lurked in the back of the room, hoping Marlene and her friends would tell me something I didn't know. I knew the man who was supposed to be my savior had healed lepers and raised men from the dead, but I didn't know how to live like him, selflessly and free of desire. I saw Mary Magdalene on her knees, anointing him with her perfumes, burning her incense, combing his long hair. I wondered how he could resist her.

Marlene's followers spoke of mounting the wings of eagles, and went into a swoon singing a song about love being patient and kind and altogether lacking in envy. I longed to have the patience to love Marlene, but I swiftly failed.

On the fourth day Marlene indulged in a rousing reading of the Twenty-third Psalm. Her flabby thighs shook when she claimed to be walking through the valley of the shadow of death, and she looked straight at me when she said God was preparing a table for her in the presence of her enemies. When she finished her bit, Marlene wiped the sweat from under her nose and marched down the aisle toward the very place where I stood. I looked over my shoulder, but sure enough, I was the only one there. “I'm so glad you've joined us,” she said. “I hope you'll sit in front tomorrow and that you'll prepare a reading of your own to share with the others.”

I considered Marlene's generosity through the years: the valentines I didn't get, the parties I wasn't asked to attend. “You know,” she said, “it's a wonderful thing. We've had our disagreements in the past. We never could be friends before, but now we can be friends in the Lord. Isn't that fine?”

“That's not fine at all,” I said. “That's a heap of crap. Either people are friends or they're not.” Marlene sputtered but couldn't answer. Swearing was a great sin to her. She had a gift for meanness when she was a kid, but as far as true wickedness was concerned, Marlene Grosswilder was as helpless as a blind woman describing the color red. I was sure no boy had ever chased her through the woods, no dogs had ever bounded across her dreams.

I didn't waste time on guilt. I needed guidance, someone who understood that the depths of my sins went far beyond using a cuss word now and then, someone who would recognize evil at a glance, a woman who wouldn't hesitate to pluck out her own eye if it offended her. I knew just where to find that woman, but I'd have to wait until Tuesday night.

15

I HAD
to sin to go to Freda Graves's house. I had to lie to my mother. This was the price God demanded, the rip in my veil of purity, a constant reminder of my inability to escape myself. God kept me humble.

The night I joined Freda Graves's group, people nodded to me as if they'd been expecting me for some time. I spotted Myron Evans, more pale than ever, his hands resting limp on his knees; I had to look away, thinking how he'd offered to pay Zack Holler for something I was beginning to understand. I was ashamed to know, ashamed to be tempted by the same boy. I flushed with the memory of Myron as he cradled his strangled cat, its early death the cost of desire.

Lyla Leona wore a red satin top with spaghetti straps. We'd had a freak spring storm the day before and a fine layer of snow still clung in the shadows near the houses, but Lyla never shivered. Her cheeks burned bright as just-slapped skin. She was a warm woman. Bo Effinger sat squeezed up against her on the loveseat. He pinched his own legs, fighting the urge to lay one of those gigantic paws on Lyla's big thigh. He meant to leave a trail of marks up and down his leg, a reminder to be good. He had to keep hold of himself. Who else would dare to stop a six-and-a-half-foot man with a bulging forehead and no eyebrows? No one. His white hair shot up straight from his skull, fine and sparse, dead grass on a hill, ready to blow away.

Mrs. Graves's congregation had swelled to nearly twenty; I was the youngest but not the furthest astray. Minnie Hathaway motioned to me, patting the empty place beside her on the couch. I couldn't refuse her invitation. Now that Minnie denied herself the calming effects of alcohol, she couldn't keep still. Her head bobbed on her skinny neck; every few minutes her whole body jumped, as if an electric jolt buzzed through her cushion. She tried to pretend nothing had happened. After punching the air with her bony fists, she folded her white-gloved hands over her patent leather purse and smiled at the ceiling. She had tried to paint a beauty mark at the side of her mouth, but a spasm in her palsied hand made the mole look huge and cancerous.

I knew Minnie Hathaway's father had lived too long. That's what Arlen said. He chased every young man from their porch. When he finally had the decency to die, Minnie was already wrinkled and her hands shook in the morning. She couldn't make her coffee fast enough to stop the tremors. After a while she didn't bother to try: whiskey was just as warm and worked twice as fast.

She owed her father her life, that's what she thought. Her mama died the day she was born. “That old fool Dr. Trent told Herman Hathaway his wife was dead before he mentioned his daughter was alive,” Arlen told me. “When the poor man heard the baby wail, he thought she'd been born of a dead woman, and no amount of talk could convince him otherwise. He dressed her up so fine, in little wool capes with fur collars, pretty lacy dresses, and patent leather shoes. But he couldn't bear to look at her—even in the end when she had to feed him from a spoon that old man didn't look her in the eye.”

Minnie was only twenty when her father had his first stroke. He never spoke again. He didn't speak but he lived. Fifteen years of silence. Fifteen years of blinks and grimaces. Fifteen years of bedpans and soiled sheets, and oatmeal dribbling down his chin.

I stared at Minnie Hathaway, looking for the girl she had been before she watched her father die so slowly. But that girl was gone; the face I saw was withered beyond salvation, withered even beyond the grace of love. I thought she'd done the right thing, staying with her father all those years, but I saw how she'd paid, and I was afraid.

These were my comrades, Lyla and Bo, Myron Evans and Minnie Hathaway, familiar people I did not know. Just being in their company made me think there must be hope for somebody like me. I wasn't too far gone, not by comparison.

The lights flickered. A blast of cold air moved through the room like a parade of the dead. Freda Graves stood in the entryway, stomping snow off her boots. Her hands were bare, chapped and raw from the cold. She wore layers of scarves and shawls, dark and unwashed, tattered moth-eaten wool and frayed silk. She unwrapped herself quickly, leaving the last shawl draped around her shoulders.

I thought, the face of God himself could not be more fearsome. Her gray curls sprang from her head, thick and impenetrable. Only a steel pick could find its dark way through those unparted strands. Deer moss hanging in the forest was like silken threads next to the hair of Freda Graves. I was sure no smile had ever tainted her lips; no young girl's brazen blush had risen on those bony cheeks; no summer light had ever broken in her eyes. Her eyes burned with the dark fires of redemption. Jesus might be kind, but God and Mrs. Graves were only merciful.

She glided to the center of the room and raised her hands. “Praise the Lord,” she said. “Let us bear our suffering on earth. Let us fall to the ground and thank God for testing us. Let us curve our backs to the whip and be grateful.” She whispered, “The closer you are to God, the more the devil wants you. You've got to look behind you.”

I resisted the temptation to glance over my shoulder to see if the devil hunkered down behind the sofa. Her words were strangely comforting to me: I was still so far from the Lord that the devil couldn't possibly have any interest in snatching my soul, not yet.

“The devil loves attention. He doesn't care if you worship him or curse his name. To the devil, it's all the same. He hears you call and his pitiless heart pumps with pride just knowing he's stolen our thoughts from the Lord. He prances on his goat legs; he sings from his frog throat. But we won't utter his name. No, he won't trumpet and dance in this room. But I warn you—the devil lies in wait for you, for all of you. The God you love will watch with idle hands while His evil brother tries to snare you. God only wants the purest hearts. An untried soul is an empty prize.

“One among us is tested even as I speak. One man in this room has the sweet fruit of evil pressed to his lips. Oh, do not bite that apple, brother. Let your body wither to the bone. The body's life is short, but the soul suffers for all eternity.”

No one dared to look around the room. I could almost see the heat jumping off Bo Effinger's skin, fierce and dry. Second by second, I grew more certain he was the one. I thought he'd have to crawl to Freda Graves's feet and beg her to stop him from doing what he wanted to do to Lyla Leona.

But Bo Effinger's soul was not the one Mrs. Graves saw perched on the shore of the lake of fire, not tonight. She turned and lit three candles on the table behind her. “Come to me, Elliot Foot,” she said. “Come and stand before the flames.”

Elliot rose like a man condemned. A runt in any litter, that's what Aunt Arlen said, a scrawny little man with spectacles. His hair started halfway back his skull, and the unsteady light of the candles made shadows pass like clouds of remorse across the high curve of his forehead. Freda Graves beckoned, forgiving mother, brutal angel.

She stood behind her table and Elliot faced her. The row of candles flared. “Can you hold your hand in the flame?” she said, her voice soft as wind through grass.

Elliot pulled his wire-rims tight around his ears as if to remind her there were certain things you couldn't do to a man wearing glasses.

She waited for an answer, but none came. “Elliot,” she said at last, “how close can you bring your finger to the fire?” He shoved his hands in his pockets and settled into himself, shrinking by the second, a boy with a beard.

Joanna Foot squinted so hard her eyes disappeared, and I feared her face might crack. She rocked back and forth, all two hundred pounds of her, silly Humpty Dumpty about to fall. Careful, I thought, careful—there's too much of you to put together again.

“Give me your hands,” Mrs. Graves said. She clutched his fingers and pulled them toward the flames, closer and closer, ever so slowly, giving him time to struggle or plead. But the little man was proud. He let her have her way until his knuckles grazed the fire, until we heard a sizzle and smelled the hair burn off the backs of their hands. Elliot jerked free.

“Oh, the flesh is tender,” she said, “and the flesh is weak. You who cannot hold your finger to the burning wick would risk plunging your soul into the fiery pits of hell for a few days of pleasure on this earth. Do you fear these pitiful flames? The final conflagration will scorch the face off the earth. Oh, pray that you will be among the chosen, pray that you will be raised in grace before you see the days of our Lord's wrath.”

Freda Graves squeezed out the flames, one by one, between her thumb and forefinger.

Elliot sat down beside his fat, grinning wife. Mrs. Graves spoke with the voice of a woman who has crossed the valley of bones and climbed to the mountaintop, her bare feet cut and bleeding. “My children,” she said, “didn't Matthew tell us that a man who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery in his heart? If your right eye leads you into sin, pluck it out.”

She made Elliot confess. “Olivia Jeanne's come back,” he said. “Wants to take me on another ride.” He wouldn't let her in the door, so she'd parked her Winnebago right in front of the Last Chance Bar. “Says she'll ruin my business if I don't do what she wants.” Now I knew I'd seen Miss Olivia Jeanne Woodruff, but I never thought she'd be any man's temptation. Her skin was yellow, and her long eyes had a sleepy, stupid look. Even so, I wondered what a girl as young as Olivia saw in the likes of Elliot Foot.

“Heed the words of Peter,” said Mrs. Graves. “She has eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin. She entices unsteady souls. Her heart is trained in greed. She would steal you from your children.”

There was some speculation among us that Olivia Jeanne had been carried back to Willis on the very wings of the devil. This was an interesting topic, and we couldn't help letting our minds wander for a half hour or so—though Mrs. Graves had warned us about giving the devil that kind of attention.